Acedia and Me

It’s Thursday morning and I’m at the kitchen table in my pajamas, eating cereal and trying to ignore Zulu, who is sitting silently by my side and staring up at me with big brown eyes. Occasionally he’ll lie down without being asked and wag his tail, just to show me what a good boy he is and how much he deserves a treat.

I told Mike last night that I sometimes feel guilty when I eat in front of Zulu without sharing because he so obviously longs for what’s in my bowl and I know I could make him so happy (for at least the half second it took him to gulp it down) by giving him some. Mike told me I had boundary issues.

So this morning I’ve read the letters in all four email accounts, perused my google reader, checked facebook, skimmed the news, glanced at Twitter, and now I’m stuck.

What I should be doing is going upstairs, taking a shower, and then getting down to work on the trauma chapter I’m slated to be writing this week for a university in London. Or writing a thought-provoking blog, or even a fun and frothy blog along the lines of, “ten ways owning a puppy has helped prepare me for motherhood”. Or doing one of any number of other productive things, like pregnancy yoga, with my pajama-clad self.

But I’m in one of those moods. The only thing I really want to do right now is bake giant ginger molasses cookies. Except there are a couple of large red stop signs standing between me and executing this want – most notably the fact that there is probably no molasses within a 500 mile radius of me, closely followed by the fact that we do not have an oven.

Given that, I just want to go back to bed and keep reading the book I started last night. But even that plan is not sounding all that enticing.

“Maybe you have acedia,” Mike said last night after I’d kept him up past his bedtime, tossing and turning and sighing and admitting that I was in a woeful mood and had no idea why.

“Maybe I have pregnancy,” I huffed. “Maybe I’ve been waking up half a dozen times a night because my bladder is now the size of a lima bean, and there are mosquitoes in here, and someone snores.”

“That too,” Mike said, clearly hopeful that if he appeased me I would let him go to sleep before midnight.

But I’ve been thinking about this issue of acedia again this morning, and of a book I read a couple of years ago – Acedia and Me, by Kathleen Norris.

I heard Kathleen speak several years ago at a writer’s conference and immediately put this book on my “to be bought” list. When it arrived I read it with highlighter in hand, and today when I flipped through it again the book was full of colour. Acedia is definitely something I’ve struggled with at times, and even if the root cause of my problems at the moment are primarily pregnancy hormones and disrupted sleep, the mood it’s engendering certainly looks something like acedia.

So what is acedia?

Acedia was originally a monastic term, one of the “eight bad thoughts” that plagued monks. The monks often referred to acedia as the noonday demon – a great lethargy, restlessness, and animosity that beset the monks during their afternoon prayers. Over the centuries, however, some of the subtlety of the monk’s conception of these eight bad thoughts as temptations that an individual may identify and resist before they turned into harmful actions was lost. The eight bad thoughts became the seven deadly sins, and acedia was subsumed within sloth.

At its Greek root the word means “absence of care.” Someone afflicted by acedia refuses to care or is incapable of doing so. Norris puts it this way. “I suspect that much of the restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair that plague us today are the ancient demon of acedia in modern dress. When we look at acedia’s root meaning, as not caring, we can see it as a social problem, and perceive that the sloth it engenders is anything but an insignificant physical laziness. It may even manifest as hyper-activity, but it is more like the activity of a hamster on a treadmill than action that will enhance the common good.”

Norris writes that, for her, acedia manifests first as a series of thoughts that tempt her from her work. These thoughts tell her it’s not worth it, or too much effort, or to take a break and do something more fun. If she indulges that voice for too long, she says, she can then start to grow weary with the repetition involved in daily routines of life such as showering, shopping, and cooking. She slips into states she calls “both anxious and lethargic” in which she can trudge through several paperback novels a day for days on end – not so much reading the books as consuming them. She complains of having so many leisure choices that she grows indifferent to them, even as she hungers for still more novelty.

Does this ring a bell for anyone but me?

Next time we’ll look at Norris’ thoughts on battling acedia.

Have you ever heard the word acedia before? Do you ever struggle with it? What do you tend to do when it strikes? And what do you think of the quote below?

“If the church has made too much of the sin of pride, which seduces us into thinking too highly of ourselves, it has not made enough of the sin of sloth, which allows us to settle for being less than we can be, both as individuals and as society.”